The Daily Messenger

Revealing that which is concealed. Learning about anything that resembles real freedom. A journey of self-discovery shared with the world.
Have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them - Ephesians 5-11
Join me and let's follow that high road...

Amid social unrest and loss of faith in the
nation's currency, India's economy has ground to a halt with its
Composite PMI crashing by a record in the last month as demonetization
strikes.

However, even more problematic is that Indians have validated 82% of bank notes rendered worthless by PM Modi, dramatically undermining the government’s estimate of unaccounted wealth in the economy. As Bloomberg reports,

About
12.6 trillion rupees ($185 billion) had been deposited into bank
accounts as of Dec. 3, the people said, asking not to be identified
citing rules for speaking with the media. The government had
estimated that about 5 trillion rupees of the 15.3 trillion rupees
sucked out by Modi’s move would stay undeclared, implying that this was cash stashed away to evade taxes, known locally as black money.

Lack of a meaningful cancellation could be a double blow
for Modi as the measure was being used as a political and economic gauge
of the success of his Nov. 8 move. One of Modi’s biggest
campaign pledges was to expose black money in Asia’s No. 3 economy, and
economists were viewing the cash as a potential windfall for the
government.

"Some of the windfall that the government was hoping for from the cancellation of notes will be dented,"
said Anjali Verma, chief economist at PhillipCapital Ltd. "That means
the fiscal stimulus that was being expected might also take some hit.
That is not good news at a time when direct consumption, private
investment is not expected to pick up."

"Markets are not too worried at the moment," said Chakri Lokapriya,
Mumbai-based managing director at TCG Advisory Services, which manages
about $3 billion. "But if 12-13 trillion rupees comes back into the system it defeats the whole theory of black money."

In such a situation where the gains of demonetization aren’t apparent, individuals will more closely analyze the pain. A
slump in demand due to the cash shortages will hurt company revenues
and government tax collections, widening the budget deficit and
ultimately weakening the rupee, Lokapriya said.

So was the whole effort merely, as Modi admitted, a move towards a cashless society after all? And not in any way related to corruption? Either way, it is too late now as faith in the fiat currency has collapsed.
Finally, while most shrug and say "how does that affect us?",
the tumult in India is weighing heavily on the rest of the world via
the oil market. India has been the world’s fastest-growing crude market
and that may weaken as the government’s cash crackdown slows the
economy. As Bloomberg reports,

Diesel
and gasoline use, which account for more than half of India’s oil
demand, will slow or contract this month and possibly early next year, according to Ivy Global Energy Pte., FGE and Centrum Broking Ltd.

“As the Indian economy largely depends on various cash-intensive sectors, the demonetization saga will no doubt slow down economic growth in the near term,”
said Sri Paravaikkarasu, head of East of Suez oil at FGE in Singapore.
“Moving into the first quarter, an expected slowdown in the economic
growth should marginally drag down oil consumption, particularly that of
transport fuels.”

Diesel consumption could fall as much as 12 percent and gasoline demand as much as 7 percent this month, according to Tushar Tarun Bansal, director at Ivy Global Energy.

“I expect to see a much smaller growth in diesel demand of about 2 percent in the first quarter,” Bansal said.

The possible slow down this month and into next year is a reversal of the demand spike seen in November
as people rushed to fill their tanks to take advantage of a rule
allowing fuel retailers to accept the banned 500 and 1,000 rupee ($15)
bills until Dec. 2.

So an Indian PM 'flaps his wings' and the rest of the world may have a hiccup.

"It ain't what we don't know that hurts us; it's what we think we know that ain't so"--Will Rogers

The
Sandy Hook experience has divided Americans, most of whom have been
convinced by media coverage that it was a real event, where a young man
massacred 20 children and six adults before killing himself.

Another
substantial segment of the US population has taken a closer look at the
evidence and drawn the conclusion it was a hoax, where no children
really died: it was an elaborate psy-op to promote gun control.

Americans
are hard pressed to sort these things out, because they are hit with a
blizzard of reports that appear to confirm the official account, leaving
them in the predicament of not being able to tell if it was real or
fake.

It
matters even more today because gun control has become one of the
defining issues of politics in America, where leading Democrats (Barack
Obama and Hillary Clinton) are using their authority as President (in
the first instance) to issue Executive Orders constraining our 2nd
Amendment rights and (in the second) threatening to impose liability
laws upon their manufacturers for their use by those who buy them. Ben
Carson, on the Republican side, has observed that Jews would have been
better able to fend off The Third Reich had they not been disarmed; and
Matt Drudge has challenged the President to demonstrate his sincerity by
giving up his (heavily armed) Secret Service protection.

The
appeals to Sandy Hook (shooting 20 children), the Charleston shooting
(of nine blacks) and the Oregon shooting (where college students were
asked their religion and those responding "Christian" were shot in the
head) have struck some observers as appearing to be calculated to
instill fear into specific targeted subpopulations of the American
community: parents, blacks and Christians, for example, where it's as
though we were experiencing a series of psy-ops to
convince the public that we ought to give up our guns. That troubles
many, because disarming populations has all-too-often occurred to set
the stage for tyranny in world history past. What if Sandy Hook was only an illusion?

Probabilities vs. Certainties

Knowledge of
historical events (based upon documents and records, photos and videos
and witness testimony, for example) can never be “definitive and
certain”. You only know your own origin in life (where
and when you were born and the parents who brought you into this world)
on the basis of information that could have been faked. Even DNA
comparisons can be invalid or mistaken on purpose or by accident. Your
belief about today’s day/month/year is
something else of which you have no direct and certain knowledge but
rather have a host of sources of information, such as newspapers and
television reports, which collectively confirm your belief but could be
fabricated or faked, but which are almost always accurate and true.

The occurrence of
an elaborate hoax intended to fool the people does not occur often, but
there can be no doubt that it does sometimes occur. The Warren Report (1964),
for example, provides an indictment of Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone
assassin of JFK, where the evidence for that conclusion was carefully
selected and, in some cases, completely fabricated. The backyard
photographs were faked, for example, and the home movies of the
assassination were edited. That he had been captured in a famous photo
taken during the shooting was suppressed. (Check out The Great Zapruder Film Hoax (2003) or many articles about JFK at jamesfetzer.blogspot.com for abundant proof, if you like.) These things can and sometimes do happen. And one of them happened here.

If you only read the government’s account, you might very well be
convinced that JFK had been killed by Lee Oswald. And if you only paid
attention to the mass media, you would probably believe that 20 children
died at Sandy Hook. Once you acknowledge that some of the evidence has
been fabricated or faked, however, the case begins to assume a
completely different character. This does not mean we cannot know what
happened in this instance, but it should not have been necessary to frame a guilty man. New
evidence or alternative hypotheses may thus require us to revised our
position by rejecting hypotheses we previously accepted, accepting
hypotheses we previously rejected and leaving others in suspense. We now
know more about Sandy Hook.

Inference to the best explanation

The principle known as “inference to the best explanation”, has the
potential to turn every American into a critical thinker in comparing
alternative hypotheses. In relation to Sandy Hook, there are two
alternatives, which have consequences that would also be true (or
probably true) if they were true and others that would be false (or
probably false) if they were not (setting the alleged suicide by Adam
Lanza to the side):

(h1) Sandy Hook was a real event, where 20 children and 6 adults were killed at a school;

(h2) Sandy Hook was an elaborate hoax, where a drill was conducted and no children died.

But the key
to understanding is making an appraisal of which of these hypotheses is
better supported by the evidence. We can think of the evidence as effects of one or another hypothesis as their cause. When one hypothesis makes the effects more probable than the other, it is more likely to be true and the alternative false. For
the shooting to have been real, the school had to have been operational
in 2012; yet we have indication after indication thatit had been abandoned by 2008 (which you will discover in Chapters 2 and 3),
including not only its deplorable physical condition (both inside and
out), but also that it was not in compliance with both federal and state
laws required in accordance with the Americans with Disabilities Act:

Analogously, we know from past
experience that the names, ages and sex of victims of crimes are almost
invariably printed in newspaper accounts of crimes. In this case,
however, the final reports coming from the Connecticut authorities did
not include them. That is a very odd aspect of this event, but an
attempt has been made to explain it away on the ground of preserving the
privacy of the families of the victims. But if there were victims,
their families already know they are dead. There is no evident benefit
to the families, if it was real, but a major element of the cover up, if
it was not.

From the date of the event, we have a photograph taken from a CT State Police chopper at 9:15 AM/ET, which is 20 minutes before the
first 911 call came in; there was no surge of EMTs into the building to
rush those little bodies off to hospitals, where doctors could
pronounce them dead or alive; virtually all of the emergency vehicles
were kept at the Firehouse, which became the center of activity as
opposed to the school; the parents were not even allowed to identify
their children, which was done using photos. As a parent myself, I can
emphasize that there is no way I could have been kept from viewing the
body of a child of mine, where the conduct of the "parents" in this case
is unlike that of any parents I have ever known, where these many
oddities are confirmed by Chapter 5.

Other circumstantial anomalies

If
the school had been abandoned, then the shooting has to be an illusion,
since there would have been no students present for Adam Lanza to
shoot. And if that were the case, then we might not be surprised if any
number of measures were taken at the time by authorities to suppress
relevant information (and thereby making it unavailable) or by otherwise
circumventing what would have been the ordinary and normal procedures
of investigation and administration by local and state authorities. But
the measures that were taken were rather extraordinary, including these
examples:

* the Attorney General of Connecticut argued against releasing the 911 calls, where the court ruled against him;

* the Clerk of Newtown entered into secret negotiations with the state legislature to avoid issuing death certificates;

* a
special panel of the state legislature recommended that any state
employee who released information about Sandy Hook other than via
Freedom of Information Act request be prosecuted as an E-felony with a
five year sentence; and,

* those
who were hired to participate in the demolition of the school building
were required to sign life-time gag orders that prohibit them from
talking about what they saw or did not see during its destruction.

Each
of these qualifies as a “fact” insofar as its truth can be confirmed by
research you can conduct yourself. Admittedly, if all the information
accessible via the internet about Sandy Hook were fabricated or faked,
that would not be the case. But I know of no one who seriously contests
any of these points. So ask yourself, what
is the probability that these five claims (if we also include the
missing names, ages and sex from the final report) would be true if
Sandy Hook had been a real event? And by comparison, what is the probability these five claims would be true if Sandy Hook had been a hoax?Which hypothesis is more likely to be true?

The Governor's Press Conference

The
day of the shooting, Governor Dan Malloy and his Lt. Governor held a
press conference, during which he observed that they had been “spoken
to” that something like this might happen. That got me thinking about, “something like this”? What could that mean. There are only two alternatives: (a)
that he had been told there would be a shooting in a school in his
state, in which case he, as governor, should have warned school
districts to be on high alert and make sure it did not happen, which he
did not do; or, (b)
that he had been told they would be taking an abandoned school and
using it as a prop for a drill, which would be presented to the public
as real to promote an aggressive gun-control agenda, which is the case
here.And
when I looked into recent visits with the Governor to determine by whom
he might have been "spoken to", I discovered that Attorney General Eric
Holder had met with him on 27 November 2012 to discuss "Operation
Longevity", a special interest of the Attorney General and the President
of the United Staes for promoting gun control. Mark
my words. The evidence presented here demonstrates that the school was
closed by 2008; that there were no students to evacuate; that Adam Lanza
appears to have been a work of fiction; and that the
teachers, the parents, the Newtown School Board, the State Police, the
Medical Examiner and the Governor--and by extension the Attorney General
and the President--were all complicit in the deception.

We have the FEMA manual

Our
collaborative research, you will find for yourself, is extensive,
through and detailed--and leaves this matter resolved beyond any
reasonable doubt. We have 50 photos that show the preparation of the
Lanza home as a prop and another 50 documenting the refurbishing of the
school as a stage (in Chapters 7 and 8). Doubt in this case would be
reasonable were there a reasonable alternative explanation. But, as you are about to discover, there is none here.

And I am not just talking about the sign, "Everyone must check in", the Port-a-Potties,
the boxes of bottled water and pizza cartons at the Firehouse, the name
tags on lanyards and parents bringing their children to (what was
supposed to be) a child shooting massacre! WE HAVE THE FEMA MANUAL. It
stipulates that everyone must register and that refreshments and
restrooms will be provided. Some participants did not realize that the
official event was not until the 14th: We now know why some of the donation pages went up a day early and why Adam Lanza was recorded as having died on the 13th!Don't take my word for it, because you can read it for yourself. I included it here as Appendix A.

The Requirement of Total Evidence

Indeed, scientific reasoning specifically and rational inquiries generally must satisfy the requirement of total evidence: in the search for truth, reasoning must be based upon all of the available relevant evidence, where
evidence is relevant when its presence or absence (or truth or falsity)
makes a difference to the outcome, typically on the basis of
considerations of probability. According to the official report on Sandy Hook by Danbury States Attorney Stephen Sedensky (to which we refer as "The Sedensky Report"),
there were 489 children present that day. Minus 20 murdered, there
ought to have been 469 to evacuate (as well as around 70 more teachers,
administrators and staff). But we have no pictures of their evacuation.
What we have instead this "iconic" photograph:

It has sometimes been said that "You can't prove a falsehood true!" But
that assertion overlooks the role of false clams and fabricated
evidence. We have here a photograph purporting to show a string of
children being led away from the school to safety by a policewoman on
the scene. This photo was published on the front page of virtually every
newspaper in the world--and shown endless times on television. It was
undoubtedly the single most important form of proof in convincing the
public around the world that Sandy Hook was real. But there is a catch: the photograph was staged! And
we know that not on the basis of the weaker evidence that there are too
many leaves on the trees and no frost for this to be a 28 degree day in
December but because Shannon Hicks took a second photograph!

Rearranging the kids to get a better shot It's
bad enough that we have a series of parents looking on, some with their
arms cross or their hands in their pockets--which is certainly not what
we would expect in an emergency situation. It gets much worse when you
realize that the police woman has stopped the children to rearrange them
to get "a better shot"! Here's a comparison that shows what was going
on and demonstrates--as conclusively as anyone could have the right to
expect--that the first photograph was staged to create the false
impression that there was an emergency and that these kids needed to be
removed from a threat at the earliest possible opportunity--which would
not leave time to stop and rearrange them as follows:

We
not only know that Shannon Hicks was "in on the game" by taking these
photos (as early as in October) in preparation for this elaborate
charade but we also know that there was no evacuation. The claim is sometimes made that “You can’t prove a negative!” But that turns out to be false. When
evidence that ought to be present if an hypothesis were true is not
present, then the absence of evidence qualifies as evidence of absence.
Suppose you were told there is an elephant in your living room. If you
go there and find no indications of the presence of an elephant, you are
completely justified in inferring that there is no elephant in your
living room.

If 469 kids should have been there, if the event was real, but they are
not there, you are completely justified in inferring it was not real. An
evacuation would have looked something like this, with strings of
children led by other police officers or teachers performing their duty
under stress. But we have DashCam footage at the locations in the
parking lot where, according to official police records, the evacuation
was taking place--and there is nothing there! Just as the absence
of signs of the presence of an elephant in your living room is proof of
the absence of an elephant, the absence of signs of the presence of
children undergoing evacuation is proof that no evacuation was taking
place.

More parking lot anomalies--and a stunner!

Inspection
of the vehicles in the parking lot in front of the school shows that
they are parked in the wrong direction (which should have been nose-in),
given the arrangement for driving into the lot. The image itself
suggests of a group of drivers methodically filling up the lot with used
or abandoned cars, driving straight into the designated parking places
without regard for how they should have been arranged. Once again we
ask, “What is the probability that the
lot would be filled with cars parked in the wrong direction, if this had
been a real event? What if this had been a drill?” Truly stunning,
however, is the discovery of a series of photographs that display
setting the stage early in the morning for the events that would
transpire this day, including this one from Chapter 8:

Notice
that the windows of Classroom 10 are not shot out and the flag is up.
Wayne Carver can be seen behind the man in the blue evidence suit. This
photograph is taken from one of the elevated cameras we have discovered
that were mounted around the parking lot to record the drill. The
mortuary tent is not there yet, which makes this early morning. Could we have more decisive proof?When
an hypothesis has been confirmed by abundant evidence and no
alternative explanation is reasonable, it has been established “beyond a
reasonable doubt”. Hypothesis (h1), that Sandy Hook was real, has been
falsified and (h2), that this was an elaborate hoax, has been proven
beyond any reasonable doubt.

Benefits to the Participants

The
benefits to those who participated in the Sandy Hook hoax have been
substantial. The donation sites created by "families of the victims"
have hauled in over $27,000,000 or in excess of $1,000,000 per family.
Other substantial grants have been given to alleviate the pain and
suffering of those who responded to the event. On Friday, 12 December
2014, for example, Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Chris Murphy
(D-CT) and Representative Elizabeth Esty (CT-5) announced a $775,914
grant from the Department of Justice's Office for Victims of Crimes and
their families, first responders and members of Newtown community in the
wake of the shooting to "help fund continued mental health services and
other support services", which sounds like a lot for participating in a
charade.

Other pay-offs, bribes and hush-money--and under the circumstances, is there something more appropriate to call it?--are
documented in Chapter 5. When debate was taking place over the choice
between refurbishing the old school or constructing a new one, The Newtown Bee published
about the presence of asbestos, lead and PCBs in the building, which
had no doubt factored in the earlier decision to abandon the school in
2008. Newtown received $50,000,000 to build a brand new K-4 elementary
school. I surveyed the cost of comparable cost for K-4 schools across
the nation and discovered they average $7,000,000, which reflects the
generous benefits that a community might accrue from cooperating
covertly with the federal government in the pursuit of its political
agenda.

The Gun-Control Agenda

We
are told that fewer guns means less crime. But when you look into
serious studies of crime rates in relation to gun laws, that is not what
you discover. Appendix D, for example, "Comparing Murder and Homicide
Rates before and after Gun Bans", suggests something closer to the
opposite is the case; and Appendix E, "Comparing Death Rates from Mass
Public Shootings in the US and Europe",demonstrates we are not the nation with the highest rates of mass public shootings, contrary to our president's claims. BarackObama himself praised the sweeping gun confiscation that took place in Australia in the late 1990s and said:

“Couple
of decades ago, Australia had a mass shooting, similar to Columbine or
Newtown,” Obama said. “And Australia just said, well, that’s it, we’re
not doing, we’re not seeing that again, and basically imposed very
severe, tough gun laws, and they haven’t had a mass shooting since.”

And while they haven’t seen a mass shooting since, local officials say that gun violence on the continent is much worse than it was before the tougher gun policies went into effect.

Meanwhile, the one thing that the President failed to recognize is that gun crime in the U.S. is on the decline. According to a PEW research study, gun crime is down 49% since 1993. Another study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics showed that non-fatal gun crime is actually down 70% since the same time. Even
the President’s own study performed by the Center for Disease Control
reached a similar conclusion: “Firearm-related death rates for youth
ages 15 to 19 declined from 1994 to 2009,” the report states. “The
number of public mass shootings of the type that occurred at Sandy Hook
Elementary School accounted for a very small fraction of all
firearm-related deaths.” What these studies show is there’s a clear
agenda being carried out by the Mainstream Media to make it seem like
mass shootings are the norm. As soon as a mass shooting happens, it
reverberates through all the major news networks for weeks, much like an
echo after the initial shot. Because of this, much of the nation seems
to believe that gun violence, particularly school shootings, is on the
rise even with evidence that points to the contrary.

The reasons behind this
aggressive behavior by the administration, even when gun violence has
been falling in the United States, involves deep questions about the
role of DHS in our society and why America has been devolving into a
totalitarian state. I was born a year-and-a-day before Pearl Harbor, as
my father used to put it; and I would never have imagined in my wildest
dreams that the United States of American could descend into a
bottomless pit of lies, deceit and deception.

Faking a school shooting to instill fear into a population is an act of terrorism,
where it has become clear that this instance was brought to us by
officials at every level of the Connecticut government from the teachers
and reporters to the State Police and the Newtown School board to the
Governor and the Attorney General and the President himself. And this is
the ugly legacy of Barack Hussein Obama.NOTE:
This is the republication of my blog for 24 October 2015 as we approach
the fourth observance of an elaborate scam. The book was banned by
amazon.com less than four months after having been placed on sale and
having sold over 500 copies between 22 October and 19 November 2015. We
now have a new publisher and the book can be obtained again at moonrockbooks.com in both black-and-white and color editions.

Sunday, December 4, 2016

Pizzagate took a turn for the even more bizarre on Sunday, as a man with an assault rifle walked into Comet Ping Pong to "self-investigate" the Baltimore, Maryland, pizza parlor that internet conspiracy theorists say is at the center of an international child sex ring run by prominent Democrats. 28-year-old Edgar Maddison Welch, of Salisbury, N.C., reportedly fired the rifle at least once inside the restaurant but no one was injured.As HeatSt.com reports,
Washington, D.C., police arrested the man Sunday afternoon, after
restaurant employees saw a man, described as being in his early 20s and carrying
an “assault rifle,” work his way through the dining room and then
attempt to enter the staff work area at the back of the building.

Via GEFIRA,NGOs are smuggling immigrants into Europe on an industrial scale
For two months, using marinetraffic.com, we have been monitoring the movements of ships owned by a couple of NGOs, and, using data from data.unhcr.org. We
have kept track of the daily arrivals of African immigrants in Italy.
It turned out we were witness of a big scam and an illegal human traffic
operation.
NGOs, smugglers, the mafia in cahoots with the European Union have
shipped thousands of illegals into Europe under the pretext of rescuing
people, assisted by the Italian coast guard which coordinated their
activities.
Human traffickers contact the Italian coast guard in advance to
receive support and to pick up their dubious cargo. NGO ships are
directed to the “rescue spot” even as those to be rescued are still in
Libya. The 15 ships that we observed are owned or leased by NGOs have
regularly been seen to leave their Italian ports, head south, stop short
of reaching the Libyan coast, pick up their human cargo, and take
course back 260 miles to Italy even though the port of Zarzis in Tunis
is just 60 mile away from the rescue spot.
The organizations in question are: MOAS,
Jugend Rettet, Stichting Bootvluchting, Médecins Sans Frontières, Save
the Children, Proactiva Open Arms, Sea-Watch.org, Sea-Eye and Life Boat.
The real intention of the people behind the NGOs is not clear. Their
motive can be money, we would not be surprised if it turned out to be
so. They may also be politically driven; the activities of the
Malta-based organisation, MOAS, by trafficking people to Italy is the
best guarantee that migrants will not show up on the Maltese shore.
MOAS is managed by an Maltese Marine officer well known in Malta for his
maltreatment of refugees 1).
It is also possible that these organisations are managed by naive
“do-gooders” who do not understand that offering their services they are
acting like a magnet to the people from Africa and thus they are
willy-nilly causing more fatalities, not to mention that their actions
are destabilizing Europe.
How high-minded the intentions of these organisations might be, their
actions are criminal as most of these migrants are not eligible for
being granted asylum and will end up on the streets of Rome or Paris and
undermine Europe stability raising racially motivated social tensions.
Brussels has created particular legislature to protect people
traffickers against prosecution. In a dedicated section of an EU
resolution entitled On Search and Rescue, the text states that “private
ship masters and non-governmental organisations who assist in sea
rescues in the Mediterranean Sea should not risk punishment for
providing such assistance.”2)
During the two months of our observation, we have monitored at least
39,000 Africans illegally smuggled into Italy, which was done with the
full consent of the Italian and European authorities.
* * *Ships permanently used by NGOs off the Libyan coast

The Phoenix is one of the two
MOAS vessels. The ship is regularly spotted in the territorial waters of
Libya. It is registered in Belize, South America. However, the ship is
owned and operated by the Maltese to bring the immigrants to Italia.
Website: MOAS

The Topaz Responder, a 51-meter
custom-made emergency response vessel, which hosts two high-speed
rescue launches. The ship is managed in combination with MSF. This is
one of the three ferries that can transport hundreds of people at one
go. The ship is registered at the Marshall Islands. Website: MOAS

Iuventa is registered under the flag of the Netherlands and owned by the German NGO Jugend Rettet. Website: Jugend Rettet.

The Golfo Azzurro is used by
the Dutch ‘Boat Refugee Foundation’. Golfo Azzurro operates under the
Panama flag. The Boat Refugee Foundation charters the vessel for a
symbolic price. Website: Bootvluchteling.

Dignity 1 is registered under the flag of Panama. We believe the ship belongs to Médecins Sans Frontières. Website: MSF.

The Bourbon Argos, a ship of
Médecins Sans Frontières. It is one of the three ships used to ferry
people from the smaller vessels to Italy. The vessel is currently
registered under the flag of Luxembourg. MSF.

The Aquarius is one of the
many ships managed by Médecins Sans Frontières. It is registered under
the flag of Gibraltar. Website: MSF.

The Vos Hestia search and
rescue ship, chartered by the charity Save The Children, like many of
the NGO vessels it is under the supervision of the Italian Coast Guard
Website: Save the Children.

Proactiva Open Arms operates
the Astral. We spotted the Astral many times in Libyan territorial
waters. The ship disappeared on a regular basis from the AIS tracking
websites. Website: Proactiva Open Arms.

The MS Sea-Watch I is owned by a
Berlin-based organisation. It works closely with Watch The Med, a
transnational network of people that fight against the European border
regime, and demand a free and safe passage to Europe. Website: Sea-Watch.

The MS Sea-Watch II is owned by
a Berlin-based organisation. It works closely with Watch The Med a
transnational network of people that fight against the European border
regime, and they demand a free and safe passage to Europe. Website: Sea-Watch.

The Audur is registered under the Netherlands’ flag. We do not know to whom this ship belongs.

The MS Sea-Eye is owned by
Sea-Eye-eV. Michael Buschheuer from Regensburg, Germany, and a group of
family and friends founded the non-profit sea rescue organisation
Sea-Eye e.V. Website: Sea-Eye.

The Speedy is a speedboat owned by Sea-Eye-eV. The ship is confiscated by the Libyan government. Website: Sea-Eye.

Minden is owned by the German organisation LifeBoat. The vessel is currently registered under the flag of Germany. Website: Lifeboat.

2016 is shaping up as the year when countless
conspiracy theories will be confirmed to be non-conspiracy fact: from
central bank rigging of capital markets, to political rigging of
elections, to media rigging of public sentiment, and now, commercial
bank rigging of both silver and gold.

An affidavit filed in October shed more light on the settlement process:

The negotiations with Deutsche Bank over the material terms of the
Settlement took place over several months starting in December 2015 and
continuing until the Deutsche Bank Settlement Agreement was executed on
September 6, 2016.

Following initial phone calls with Deutsche Bank’s counsel in
December 2015, Lowey and Grant & Eisenhofer engaged in lengthy
negotiations with Deutsche Bank’s counsel over the material terms of the
settlement, including the amount of the settlement consideration, the
scope of the cooperation to be provided by the Deutsche Bank Defendants,
the scope of the releases, and the circumstances under which the
parties would have the right to terminate the settlement.

During the course of the negotiations, Class Counsel presented what
we perceived to be the strengths and weaknesses of the claims and
defenses, as well as Deutsche Bank’s litigation exposure.
In February 2016, we reached an agreement with Deutsche Bank on the
amount of the settlement, subject to the negotiation of other material
terms of the deal. For example, given that this is the first settlement
in the case, it was our view that the cooperation provisions of the deal
were extremely important to our ability to maximize the overall
recovery for the class against the Non-Settling Defendants. The
negotiations as to the scope of the cooperation provisions continued for
several months.

On April 13, 2016, counsel for Deutsche Bank and Class Counsel signed
a Binding Settlement Term Sheet (“Term Sheet”). The Term Sheet set
forth the terms on which the parties agreed, subject to the negotiation
of a full Settlement Agreement, to settle Plaintiffs’ claims against
Deutsche Bank. At the time the Term Sheet was executed, Class Counsel
was well-informed about the legal risks, factual uncertainties,
potential damages, and other aspects of the strengths and weaknesses of
the claims and defenses asserted.

By letter dated April 13, 2016, the Parties reported to the Court via
ECF that the Term Sheet had been executed, and advised the Court that
the Term Sheet would be superseded by a formal settlement agreement. ECF
No. 116.

The parties negotiated the Deutsche Bank Settlement Agreement over the course of the next several months.
The negotiations over the terms of the Deutsche Bank Settlement
Agreement included various material terms over which the parties had
substantial disagreement, requiring significant give and take on both
sides. To that end, drafts of the Deutsche Bank Settlement Agreement
went back and forth between the parties, and numerous contested issues
were raised, negotiated and resolved, including without limitation,
continuing negotiations over the scope of Deutsche Bank’s cooperation
(see ¶ 4(A)-(G)), the scope of the releases (see ¶ 12 (A)-(C)), and the
circumstances under which the parties could terminate the Settlement
(see ¶ 21).

Thus, the Deutsche Bank Settlement Agreement, which was executed
(along with the Supplemental Agreement) on September 6, 2016, was the
culmination of arm’s-length settlement negotiations that had extended
over many months.

The Deutsche Bank Settlement was not the product of collusion. Before
any financial numbers were discussed in the settlement negotiations and
before any demand or counter-offer was ever made, we were well informed
about the legal risks, factual uncertainties, potential damages, and
other aspects of the strengths and weaknesses of the claims against
Deutsche Bank.

The Deutsche Bank Settlement involves a structure and terms that are
common in class action settlements in this District. The consideration
that Deutsche Bank has agreed to pay is within the range of that which
may be found to be fair, reasonable, and adequate at final approval.

There was just one thing missing: the settlement amount. Then, on
October 17, the first part of the answer was revealed when according to
court filings,Deutsche Bank had agreed to pay $38 million to settle the silver manipulation litigation.
The settlement, which was disclosed in papers filed in Manhattan
federal court, concludes one of many recent lawsuits in which investors
have accused banks of conspiring to rig the precious metal markets.
However, until Deutsche Bank's payment of $38 million to settle silver
manipulation allegations, there was never any formal closure.
* * *
Then, last night, two months after the silver settlement, Deutsche
Bank agreed to pay another $60 million to settle the other side of the
antitrust litigation: that of rigging gold.
As Reuters first
reported, the preliminary settlement was filed on Friday with the U.S.
District Court in Manhattan, and requires a judge's approval. As part of
the settelement, Deutsche Bank has denied any wrongdoing, and with the
two settlements, and some $98 million out of pocket, it is clear of any
future liability regarding precious metals manipulation.
The case is one of many in the Manhattan court in which investors
accused banks of conspiring to rig rates and prices in financial and
commodities markets.
As we reported previously, in an Oct. 3 decision, U.S. District Judge
Valerie Caproni in Manhattan said investors could pursue much of their
lawsuit against the other four banks named in the anti-trust lawsuit
which include Barclays, Bank of Nova Scotia, HSBC and Societe Generale.
In October, Vincent Briganti, a lawyer for the investors, said the
silver settlement deal provides "substantial monetary compensation plus
cooperation from Deutsche Bank in the continued prosecution of this
important case against the non-settling defendants." He has yet to
comment on the gold settlement. Alas, as a result of the settlement, yet
another discovery process has been scuttled, preventing the public from
having a glimpse into what really went on in precious metal "markets."
* * *
So who gets to benefit from the settlement? This is what the lawyer said on the silver settlement disclosed in early October:

We have reason to believe that there are at least hundreds of
geographically dispersed persons and entities that fall within the
Settlement Class definition. The Settlement Class includes traders of
COMEX Silver Futures contracts, anyone who traded in physical silver
based on the Silver Fix, and traders in various silver derivatives.

The same will likely be applicable to gold traders following Friday's monetary settlement.
The other beneficiary, of course, is the class of investors, people
and "conspiracy theorists" who claimed all along that gold and silver
were subject to rigging in various forms throughout the years. Well, you
were right. However, we wouldn't hold much hope for getting any
substantial monetary rewards. By the time the settlement is done, there
will likely be at best a few hundred dollars left per claimant.
The good news is that this formal closure will open the door for
other, similar lawsuits - for both silver and gold manipulation - now
that the seal has been broken.